Monday, April 27, 2015

“Come
on, John (Chandos), come on.You won’t
see me hanging back.It’s forward
now!”Then he called to his
banner-bearer, “Advance, banner, in the Name of God and St. George!”[1]

~

Beginning in the year 1337AD, all of
Western Europe found itself in the grips of
the closest Medieval equivalent to a world war.Known to us now as the “Hundred Years War,” the conflict started when
King Edward III of England –
the epitome of the bold warrior-king – proclaimed his right to the throne of France
via his Capetian mother and sought to revive the Angevin Empire of his
Plantagenet forbears.[2]The war would rage between the kingdoms of
France, England, and their respective allies for the next 117 years and would
see some of the greatest military leaders of both realms’ armies conduct some
of the most spectacular and decisive campaigns in Western Medieval history.[3]By the eventual end of the war in 1453,
engagements had been fought all across the whole of Western Europe and on the
high seas between English and French forces and a medley of allies and
mercenaries from Germany, Flanders, Italy,
Spain, Brittany,
Burgundy, Gascony,
and Scotland.The war would also have a lasting impact on European
history as a whole, with some historians like Clifford Rogers of West Point arguing that the Hundred Years War was
instrumental in bringing about the nascent prototypes of the Modern
nation-state.[4]Regardless of where one stands on the theory
– or on the “Military Revolution” debate as a whole – no historian can escape
from admitting that the war left a profound historical impact on Western
Civilization.

However, unlike most wars in our own
times, the Hundred Years War was not 117 years worth of incessant combat.It progressed in phases, with some periods
seeing intense campaigning and others in which shaky truces allowed for tense
ceasefires.The first of these phases
(sometimes known as the “Edwardian War”) began with King Edward III’s claim to
the French throne in 1337 and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Brètigny
in 1360.This phase saw some of the
greatest gains for English-held France
in the entire war – not to mention the famous English victories at Crècy,
Sluys, and Poitiers.[5]It also saw the adoption by the English of a
radical grand strategy while in France
– that of the chevauchèe, or, “great
ride.”These essentially served as
large-scale raids-in-depth that primarily targeted the vast French civil
economic base and forced the much larger French forces to attack on terms
heavily in favor of the outnumbered, but far more cohesive English.[6]In the summer of 1356, Prince Edward of Woodstock – known to history as “the Black Prince” and
perhaps one of the most famous English commanders of the war – would lead one
of these chevauchèes deep into
central French territory from his base in Bordeaux.After a brilliant campaign of tactical
maneuver and strategic-level economic warfare, the Prince’s raid would climax
in the battle at Poitiers and the capture of the French king, Jean II – the
results of which, in the words of Professor Rogers, “imposed on France in 1360
the worst humiliation suffered by that country until 1940.”[7]This campaign will serve as the topic for
this work, which will investigate its leadership, strategy, and the overall
social, political, and economic impact on the countries that participated in it
utilizing both primary sources from the time and professional analysis from
historical experts today.

The Leaders

In 1356, the Kingdom of England
and her possessions across the Channel were led by perhaps one of the greatest
collections of warriors in her history. King Edward III began his military
career at the age of 14 in the 1327 Weardale Campaign against his country’s old
nemesis in the north, Scotland.Although
the campaign itself ended in disappointment, the young King took to heart the
lessons he learned and used them to inflict crushing defeats upon the Bruce
kings of Scotland at Dupplin
Moor in 1332 and Halidon Hill in 1333, permanently reversing the Scottish
military successes that had humiliated England during the reign of his
hapless father, Edward II.[8]In 1337, he formally declared war on King
Philippe de Valois of France
and applied the same strategic skill and leadership he had learned fighting the
Scots.At his great victory at Crècy in
1346 – where Philippe’s vastly larger army of mounted knights was destroyed
piecemeal by the dismounted English men-at-arms and archers wielding the famous
longbow – King Edward presided over his own son and heir’s baptism in
warfare.Prince Edward of Woodstock, Prince of
Wales and known as the “Black Prince” (named so for the color of his armor),
was every inch his father’s son and displayed a natural skill for combat and
leadership since he first led his father’s right flank at Crècy at the age of
16.He was also unwaveringly loyal to
his King and father – a rare phenomenon for strong English kings who usually
sired rebellious or troublesome heirs.[9]

In 1355, the lords of English-aligned
Gascony (located in extreme Southwest France) petitioned King Edward for
military support and royal English leadership to meet the French threat posed
by the Count of Armagnac based in the Languedoc and to tip the balance of power
in the largely neglected south of France in England’s favor.[10]Being tied up with campaigns around Normandy and Picardy, the King dispatched the now-25 year
old Prince to Bordeaux
to command all English and Gascon forces as the newly-titled Prince of
Aquitaine.The Vie du Prince Noir, a biography of Prince Edward written by a
retainer of Sir John Chandos, records that the Prince and his army were
enthusiastically welcomed by the Gascon nobles who all rode to Bordeaux to
swear fealty to him on the spot.[11]The Prince also brought along a field staff
manned by some of the most experienced English military leaders of the day –
knights and nobles who had fought alongside his father their entire lives – who
were charged to essentially serve as Edward’s advisors.[12]With his own natural leadership abilities
reinforced by the sound counsel of his father’s senior veteran commanders and
the ardent loyalty of the native Gascon nobility, the Black Prince was in an
ideal position to execute the war in the resource-rich south of France
to devastating effect.

Facing the Prince in this campaign
would be the Valois king of France himself,
Jean II.Jean – called “the Good,”
although it is unclear how he earned this sobriquet – succeeded his father,
Philippe VI, after his death in 1350 and resolved to mount a stiff defense
against King Edward in the north of France
and in the Low Countries.Unlike his more cautious father, Jean was a
more ardent devotee to the mandates of chivalry and saw the English chevauchèes as personal affronts to his
honor that required him to ride out and meet them head-on.[13]Aiding him in this endeavor was the simple
fact that, despite the set-backs suffered in his father’s reign, Jean still
ruled over one of the largest and richest realms in Christendom and could field
armies many times larger than anything the English could deploy.An additional benefit he enjoyed was the
implicit favor of the Papacy as the popes had been seated in Avignon since 1309.Although the Avignon popes publicly claimed to be
concerned only with peace, it was no secret that they displayed greater
generosity to their French hosts.In
fact, shortly after Jean ascended to the throne, Jean le Bel records that Pope
Clement VI granted the new King’s request to receive all the tithes from French
clergy – a favor certainly not granted to the English![14]However, he experienced great difficulty in
rallying his nobles and their respective forces into armies that exhibited the
same unity of command and cohesion that English armies regularly
displayed.While this was a persistent
problem in 14th Century France, it was most likely exacerbated by
Jean’s decidedly heavy-handed approach to demanding war resources from his subjects
and his shockingly violent and unjust treatment of perceived traitors among his
nobility.[15]In short, Jean II was neither well-regarded
nor trusted by his own aristocracy and this lack of cohesion would prove
disastrous in his engagements with the Black Prince.

Strategy and Tactics

Among an older generation of
historians, there arose a belief that sound strategic thinking was entirely
absent from Medieval warfare.Historians
like Charles Oman, Tourneur-Aumont, and Sir Basil Liddell Hart expressed this
view about English actions in the Hundred Years War.[16]Professor Rogers sums up their attitude
concerning the Poitiers campaign in particular:

"Like the
Crécy campaign of 1346, the Poitiers chevauchée
has often been interpreted as “nothing more than the razzia of a ravenous
pirate,” a simple booty-collecting expedition rather than the execution of a
strategic plan aimed at obtaining a decisive result.When his attempts to escape a pursuing French
army and avoid battle failed, the argument runs, the prince was forced to
fight, and once again the tactical prowess of the English soldiers rescued their
leaders from a disaster nearly brought on by incompetent generalship.[17]"

However, this
revisionist attitude does not make sense when one examines the sources, as
other historians point out.The
chronicler Geoffrey le Baker explicitly states when discussing the Black
Princes grande chevauchée into the
Languedoc the year before that the Prince “was eager for battle because of the
peace which usually comes with it.”[18]It is fairly obvious that the English chevauchées were far more than just mere
economic destruction, but were a vital tool that allowed the outnumbered
English commanders to shape the conflict and dictate terms of engagement
favorable to them.On the tactical
defensive, English armies of crack men-at-arms and longbowmen had proven to be
near invincible, however, this only worked when the French could be goaded into
attacking.The chevauchée performed that by putting immense pressure on French
leadership to hastily react to the widespread destruction inflicted upon their
civilian subjects.In the case of the
Black Prince in 1356, the famous Hundred Years War chronicler, Froissart,
explicitly states that the Prince intended to raid northwards in the hopes of
conducting a rendezvous with the armies of his father and his brother, John of
Gaunt, in a coordinated multi-pronged attack into the heart of France.[19]No matter where he turned, Jean II would be
forced to confront the armies of one of these three.

As the staging point for his forces,
the Prince chose the friendly town of Bergerac.The plan was to march north towards the Loire River and apply pressure
to the countryside around the vitally rich cities of Tours and Poitiers,
possibly drawing out the army of King Jean’s son, the Count of Poitiers, into
an open battle as an added bonus.[20]The Anglo-Gascon army that Edward led from
Bergerac on 4 August was around 6,000 strong, with about 3,000 English and
Gascon men-at-arms, 2,000 archers equipped with the lethal longbow, and 1,000
additional infantry.[21]While these seem like small numbers with which
to seek out a battle with vastly numerical foes in enemy territory, the secret
to English success was to keep their armies nimble and capable of prolonged
periods of sustained maneuver.On the
move, almost the entire army would have been mounted to facilitate speed and
allow them to range out farther and increase the area of destruction they could
inflict.Professor Rogers estimates that
the Prince’s army, while on chevauchée,
would have marched in widely spaced divisions that could spread out over a
36-mile breadth.[22]Within that corridor, no town, village, or
farm was spared from looting and destruction.

The Prince
continued his march north until reaching the castle of Romorantin just north of
the River Cher around 30 August.While
there, he curiously settled down for a five-day siege as the castle served as
the refuge for two French nobles that had run afoul of the Prince’s army
earlier.[23]While this action made for excellent
story-material for writers like le Bel and Froissart who revealed in the
chivalric tales of combat between knights, it makes no sense if one believes
the Prince was seeking to avoid battle with the French.It becomes clearer if one considers that his
lengthy stay at Romorantin was for the precise purpose of encouraging an attack – especially since it was at Romorantin that
the Prince received word that Jean II was pressing down on him in a hurry from
Chartres with the expressed desire to seek battle.[24]The Prince finally moved out from Romorantin,
but marched due west towards the city of Tours, using the Loire River to
protect his right flank – not a move he would have made if his sole goal was to
escape south back to Bordeaux.[25]Geoffrey le Baker wrote that the Prince
“directed the day’s march towards the
usurper (Jean II).”[26]Upon reaching Tours, the city proved to
be invulnerable to attack and, not wanting to be caught between Jean’s
approaching army and the city, Edward turned his army south towards the next
rich city of the region, Poitiers.In
the words of Professor Rogers, we see in the Prince’s movements “the delicate
balance between avoiding a trap and not avoiding battle.”[27]Essentially, the Prince was teasing Jean with
his presence, staying just long enough in a particular spot to encourage the
French to continue to advance on him without allowing his small army to be
trapped in an unfavorable position.Such
maneuvers were not only sound strategic actions, but would have also required
an incredible amount of command and control, proving that Edward’s leadership
ability and that of his seasoned companions was already paying dividends.

On 16
September, the Prince halted his army within the vicinity of Poitiers.He heard rumors that Jean and his army had
arrived in the area as well, but he was not sure of their exact position.Froissart records that the Prince sent out a
small detachment of English and Gascons who, upon discovering the French
rear-guard (Jean was unknowingly passing by the Prince), launched a harassing
attack on the French column before withdrawing back to the Prince’s position.[28]Jean immediately turned his force around to
confront Edward.Again, had the Prince
been seeking to avoid battle, this action would have made no sense.When informed that the French had turned
towards him, Edward was jubilant. “The
Prince was in no way disturbed by this,” wrote Froissart, “but said: ‘May God
be with us!Now we must consider how to
fight them to the best advantage!’”[29]

The Battle

After the skirmish, the Black Prince
turned his own army and advanced towards the Jean as he turned to meet
him.Once within sight of the encamped
French, Edward deployed his own army in the defensive position classic to
English armies during this war – men-at-arms in the center and archers on the
flanks – on a patch of gently sloping ground intersected by a crossroads (today
called Croix de la Garde), several
thick hedgrows, and abandoned grape-vines.[30]To Edward’s south lay the River Miosson and a
large marsh that can still be seen today and to his rear was a patch of
woodland.It was an ideal spot to stand
on the tactical defensive.Froissart
records a French knight, Sir Eustace de Ribemont, reporting the English
position as he observed it to King Jean: “It is a very skillful piece of work
in our opinion, for if one wants to engage them by force of arms, the only way
in is between those archers, whom it will not be easy to overcome.”[31]However, it may have almost been too
good.Jean and his followers would have
no doubt remembered the lethal results of charging at an English army in the
defensive with their wings of longbowmen and their infamous arrowstorm.The French outnumbered the Prince by at least
two to one (figures for the French army vary wildly between the sources), but
Jean doubtless would have remembered that his father had faced Edward’s father
with far better odds at Crécy and had lost spectacularly.[32]The Prince is recorded as fearing that Jean
might simply sit and blockade his little army and force a submission by
starvation and, hence, begrudgingly entertained the efforts of the Papal
legate, Cardinal Tallyrand of Périgord, who approached him as a mediatory
negotiator.[33]While the Prince and Jean would trade terms
back and forth through the Cardinal for an entire day with no effect.[34]Finally, after being berated by his more
impetuous counselors for dallying, King Jean resolved to attack.[35]

The French army divided itself into
four divisions (“battles”).The first
was commanded by the two Marshals d’Audrehem and Clermont and composed of a
crack contingent of cavalry meant to sweep aside the archers and a mass of
dismounted infantry and crossbowmen to follow up.However, the two nobles were political rivals
of each other and d’Audrehem rushed forward with his knights while Clermont
held back.[36]This uncoordinated attack became fodder for
the English archers who were protected from the French knights by the thick
vines and hedgerows they used for cover.Froissart, in a rare moment of recognition for “common” soldiers,
vividly records the decisiveness of the English archers at Poitiers:

"If the
truth must be told, the English archers were a huge asset to their side and a
terror to the French; their shooting was so heavy and accurate that the French
did not know where to turn to avoid their arrows.So the English kept advancing and slowly
gaining ground.[37]"

As their forces
were mowed down by the archer-fire, Clermont fell slain and d’Audrehem was
captured.The Earl Douglas, a key
Scottish ally of King Jean’s, abandoned the field and fled.[38]So far, the battle had begun disastrously for
the French.Next advanced the Dauphin’s
division – commanded by King Jean’s son and heir – and, while they got closer
to the English lines than the first, they too suffered immensely from both the
dismounted Anglo-Gascon troops and the longbow fire and withdrew from the
field.The third division was led by
King Jean’s own brother, the Duke of Orleans, and included three of the King’s
sons.For reasons that are still unclear,
the Duke withdrew from the field before it even reached the English lines and
took over half his division (an estimated 1,600 men) and all of Jean’s sons
except for the youngest, Philippe, with him.[39]The remainder were eventually scattered
easily.While the Prince and his
commanders watched Orleans quit the field, many in their tired and depleted
army began to cheer as they had thought the third division would be the
last.The cheering turned to dismay when
they saw the banners of the fourth division – led by King Jean himself – come
into view.

﻿

In a bold move, the Prince gave his
men the order to regroup and advance, uttering the words quoted at the start of
this essay.[40]As they advanced, the archers collected spent
arrows from the battlefield and replenished their ammunition.[41]In addition, the Prince also deployed the Gascon
Captal de Buch to flank around to the rear of the King’s division with a party
of mounted knights and archers.[42]Both forces met one another dismounted and a
fierce melee commenced.The French were
led in person by Jean, who fought bravely on foot along with his youngest son,
Philippe, who had returned to him after his brother Orleans had quit the fight.[43]While the fight seemed evenly matched,
archers made their way to the flanks and began pouring fire into the sides of
the French.Finally, the Captal and his
detachment advanced from behind, shattering what resolve the King’s division
still possessed.King Jean’s standard
bearer, the famous knight Geoffrey de Charny, was slain while defending the Oriflamme and the King himself was
surrounded and captured along with his young son.[44]As soon as Jean was brought before Prince
Edward, he submitted to him and conceded defeat.While it may have only been apparent to a few
in that moment, the Black Prince had just won perhaps the most decisive victory
in the war for his father and England.

﻿

The moment King Jean and his son are surrounded during the closing actions at Poitiers.
To the far left, Geoffrey de Charny is slain defending the Oriflamme.
(Source: Graham Turner)

﻿

The Aftermath

After the King Jean handed over his
gauntlet to the Black Prince, the fortunes of France were doomed.The surviving English and Gascon veterans
carried off an enormous amount of loot from the French camp (to include many of
the Crown Jewels of France) and commenced an orderly march back to Bordeaux.[45]Behind them they left around 6,000 French
dead – nearly half of them nobles and knights – and took with them around 1,900
noble captives.[46]The natural leadership of France had been
gutted once again, only this time, the King himself was in English hands.That alone proved to be instrumental in
breaking the political deadlock that had impeded King Edward III’s efforts at
bringing the French to sue for peace.However, peace would still prove elusive and the French would not arrive
at the treaty table until four years later and not before another large chevauchée led by King Edward himself in
the north of France and a shockingly violent uprising by French peasants in
Picardy known as the Jacqueire.

The physical, political, and
economic devastation that was inflicted upon France during this phase of the
Hundred Years War was almost without comparison in the annals of Medieval
warfare.Chroniclers on both sides spoke
of entire regions depopulated and once-vibrant towns reduced to burned out
shells reclaimed by nature.[47]In the 14th Century, the
destruction of a realm’s agricultural base meant economic ruin.After receiving word of King Jean’s capture
and the enormous ransom that would be levied for his return, the remaining
noble and clerical leadership in Paris scrambled to find a way to stave off
economic ruin.While English armies
prowled about Normandy and Aquitaine, the French royal government (or, what was
left of it, rather) debased the currency and called for even higher taxes to be
collected from a populace that had already suffered the ravages of nearly two
decades of enemy chevauchées.[48]Unsurprisingly, those knights and nobles that
survived Poitiers were held in derision by their own people, so much so that
Froissart notes that many of them “were reluctant to go into the big towns.”[49]And it’s little wonder, since many would have
rightly seen them as the ones to blame for serving up a choice victory to the
Black Prince due to their impetuous and elitist conduct in warfare.English historian and longbow enthusiast
Robert Hardy captures best the great flaw of the French knightly class during
the Hundred Years War.

"The
nobility of France, intensely proud, haughty, regretting the slow moves away
from feudalism, mixed ill with the ordinary soldier and with the newly evolving
kinds of warfare brought to them from across the Channel … We have seen and we
shall see that, until such attitudes were relegated to heraldry alone, the way
was constantly open for the English armies to destroy the high chivalric
posture of those who led France in war, the French aristocracy.[50]"

This disdain for the aristocracy was
compounded exponentially by the physical and economic privations inflicted on
the French common people by the sheer destruction visited upon them by the
English chevauchées.The renowned Italian writer Petrarch, who had
been to France before the war had begun, wrote of a visit in 1360 that the
English “had reduced the entire kingdom of France by fire and sword to such an
extent that I … had to force myself to believe that it was the same country I
had seen before.”[51]While many of the time saw the raids to be
little more than rapacious plundering, there was a strategic element to
it.As discussed before, England was at
a significant numerical and logistic disadvantage when fighting on French
soil.The chevauchées allowed them to apply significant pressure on the enemy
civil populace and shape the conflict in a way that emphasized their strengths
and exploited their opponents’ weaknesses.[52]However, it also had significant unintended
consequences, like the rise of the routiers
and “free companies” that essentially eschewed allegiance to either crown and
simply went rogue to earn a profit off of professional banditry.[53]

Lastly, the French people themselves
tried to register that they too had breaking points.In a curious episode that was, in several
ways, uncannily reminiscent of the French Revolution four centuries later,
several thousand dispossessed and war-weary peasants in Picardy rose in revolt
in 1358 in an episode called the Jacqueire.Like its future Jacobin successor, this
uprising was directed exclusively towards the French aristocracy and was
shockingly violent in its execution.Froissart provides a vivid depiction of great houses being seized and
ransacked, noble women being either forced to flee or suffering violation and
death, and displays of barbarism worse than the Saracens.[54]The French nobility responded in kind,
bringing in fellow knights from the Flanders and even English allies under
truce, like the Captal de Buch, and waging a retaliatory campaign in which no
quarter was the norm.[55]

Finally, in 1360, the French were
finally prepared to discuss peace terms.In what would be known as the Treaty of Brétigny, King Edward III
dropped his claim to the throne of France in exchange for not only all the
lands previously owned by England in Aquitaine and Ponthieu, but Gascony,
Poitou, and Brittany – essentially over a third of French territory – in
addition to a ransom of £500,000 sterling for King Jean’s freedom.[56]Although these gains would slowly be chipped
away as France gradually recovered under the Fabian-like leadership of Charles
the Dauphin and the famed general Bertrand de Guscelin, it would take nearly an
entire generation before the Kingdom of France could even remotely stand on its
own again.None of this would have been
possible without the Black Prince and his strategic masterpiece of 1356 – the
campaign that, more than any other, was responsible for the winning of English
France.Professor Rogers sums it up
best:

"Over six
centuries since, France has been so completely defeated only once: in
1940.For the humiliation of 1360 to
have been inflicted on the mightiest realm of Christendom by a nation with only
a fraction of her population and wealth … represents a martial accomplishment
the likes of which very few men have ever matched.[57]"

_______.“By Fire and Sword – Bellum Hostile and ‘Civilians’ in the Hundred Years War” in Civilians in the Path of War, ed. Mark
Grimsley & Clifford Rogers.Lincoln
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.